A 27-year-old electrician at Crusoe Energy from Tennessee, Hunter Lowe says its systems slash CO2-equivalent emissions from gas flaring by up to 63% and that each one has the equivalent effect of taking around 1,700 cars off the road.

Lowe describes it as "the best job I've ever had," which pays "way more than fair." And he says business has been good during 2021's crypto boom. Crusoe isn't the only company in the business, with others including EZ Blockchain doing similar things. Yet it's one of the biggest, and has attracted investment from the listed crypto exchange Coinbase and the Winklevii twins' Winklevoss Capital.

When oil companies drill for the black stuff, they often hit natural gas too. Yet, most drillers lack the infrastructure to sell the gas and so burn it off in a process called flaring, creating the distinctive flames above oil sites.

This is where Crusoe comes in. It installs a piping system to divert the natural gas away from the flares and into generators. They produce electricity which is then used to power computers directly at the oil site.

The computers "mine" bitcoin - that is, they solve complex puzzles which help to secure the bitcoin network and create new coins. "We pay the operator for the gas that we use in our generators, providing them with an incremental revenue stream where they were previously flaring the gas for zero," Crusoe's President Cully Cavness said.